Shanghai Knights (2003)

C+
SDG

Jackie Chan makes action comedies, but there’s
also something tragic about his oeuvre. The tragedy is that
Jackie is a great talent who does not make great movies. Imagine
Charlie Chaplin starring in comedies written by Adam Sandler or
Rob Schneider, or Gene Kelly hoofing in musicals written by, uh,
Adam Sandler or Rob Schneider.

Moral/Spiritual Value

Age Appropriateness

MPAA Rating

Caveat Spectator

This frustrating juxtaposition of sublime and ridiculous is
especially sharp in Shanghai Knights, which contains more
inspired action nuttiness and brilliant slapstick than all of
Jackie’s previous Hollywood buddy movies combined, framed in a
story that’s lamer and less funny than almost any of these
previous outings.

That includes this film’s predecessor, Shanghai Noon,
which, as its witty title suggests, was a clever
East-meets-Old-West tribute to the classic Hollywood Western.
This sequel, set in London, barely manages to be a tribute to
Shanghai Noon. Yet in his inventive, elaborate stunt
choreography Jackie pays wordlessly eloquent homage to the great
physical performers of the past: The Three Stooges, Gene Kelly,
Keystone Cops, Harold Lloyd. And two ladder-fu sequences recall
one of Jackie’s own memorable triumphs in Jackie Chan’s First
Strike.

Jackie’s buddy movies have been founded on the assumption that
Jackie’s weak command of English is a handicap that can best be
compensated for by giving him a partner to do most of the
talking. Unfortunately, in practice these movies have imposed
another handicap of their own: Jackie’s creative action
choreography, the whole raison d’être of his films, has
been limited to short bursts of a couple of minutes at most.

Give director David Dobkin credit for this much: He’s the
first American director to give Jackie free rein to do what he
does best. Watching him do it, for possibly the first time it
looks as if saddling Jackie with a movie buddy isn’t such a
bright idea after all.

It doesn’t help that Owen Wilson, returning as low-key cowboy
Roy O’Bannon, hasn’t got a thing to work with, and is reduced to
such tired gags as mocking Buckingham Palace’s famously impassive
Beefeater guards and driving an out-of-control early-model
automobile cross-country before crashing into Stonehenge. In
Noon, Wilson was genuinely funny as a disarmingly
garrulous train robber; here, when we meet up with him again,
he’s been reduced to a self-described "thirty-year-old
waiter-gigolo." "Where’s the future in that?" he whines
plaintively. Or the humor value?

The plot is a trifle, of course, involving a conspiracy
between a royal heir to the British throne (Aidan Gillen) and the
Chinese emperor’s illegitimate half-brother (Donnie Yen, Iron Monkey), both of whom wish to
seize power in their respective empires. Jackie again plays Chon
Wang (pronounced more or less "John Wayne"), this time called
upon to avenge the murder of his father, the keeper of the
Imperial Seal, and to try to prevent the assassination of Queen
Victoria and her nine closest successors.

What about supporting female roles? Noon had two, a
Chinese princess (Lucy Liu) and an Indian chief’s daughter
(Brandon Merrill), who wound up more or less paired off with our
two heroes. Knights abandons both of these characters
without explanation, giving us instead Singapore-born
singer-actress Fann Wong as Lin, Chon Wang’s sister. Lin gets
some decent action scenes but is underutilized throughout, and is
pointlessly cut out of the dull climactic battle so that Wilson
can do his fifth-wheel routine a bit more.

Fortunately, Jackie’s still more than capable of carrying the
action by himself. After warming up in a deftly whimsical
sequence involving a pack of baton-wielding policemen and a
revolving door, Jackie cuts loose in the picture’s longest, most
elaborate action sequence, a battle in the streets of London over
O’Bannon’s stolen pocketwatch. (The soundtrack hammers home the
homages here, playing "Keystone Cops" music for the
revolving-door sequence and echoing Kelly’s "doo-dee-doo"
rendition of the Singin’ in the
Rain theme when Chon breaks out the umbrellas.)

Then there’s a hilarious sequence that turns the tables on
scenes like the climax of Rush
Hour, which had Jackie desperately trying to fight the
bad guys in a museum setting without damaging priceless Chinese
artifacts, a concern that made him vulnerable to the unscrupulous
bad guys. In this scene it’s the bad guys who don’t want their
stuff broken, and Chon takes full advantage of this vulnerability
in a manic sequence reminiscent of Chaplin or Harpo Marx. Though
he hasn’t got the blazing speed he once commanded, Jackie’s
ingenious use of props and physical humor remains as striking as
ever.

Unfortunately, his inspiration seems to have deserted him in
the climactic sequence, in which we get only an energetic but
unremarkable sword duel between Chon and the British villain
whose skill as a swordsman easily outstrips Chon’s. There’s
nothing fun or exciting about watching Gillen repeatedly disarm
and wound Chon, nor does it make for a satisfying finale that
Gillen is so sporting about the whole thing, repeatedly offering
Chon his sword back just to prove he can keep beating him, until
Chon changes the rules. By now we know that the bad guy always
falls to his death in these scenes; but how can we cheer when the
bad guy has just proven himself such a gallant opponent?

There’s an lot of lame attempts at period humor. It’s supposed
to be funny that the Scotland Yard detective played by Tom Fisher
turns out to be Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, that the young orphan
pickpocket turns out to be, anachronistically, Charlie Chaplin,
and so on. A number of critics have pointed out that at the time
the story is set Chaplin hadn’t yet been born and the automobile
was still in its infancy (I have yet to read anyone observing
that Stonehenge isn’t in East Anglia). In a movie of this sort,
of course, it’s unfair to pick on anachronisms of this sort,
which fall under comic license. Yet if the gags aren’t funny — well, critics have to amuse themselves somehow.

As is often the case, the outtakes are funnier than the actual
movie. In one flubbed scene, Jackie inadvertently calls Lin "my
babysitter" instead of "my baby sister," prompting Wilson to
laughingly correct him. They should have put it in the movie that
way; it would have improved the scene and the film.

The humor is also less innocent this time around. In the first
movie, the heroes go to a brothel only to get their backs rubbed,
and O’Bannon has a dream sequence in which he’s being fanned and
pampered by hookers while one nibbles on his ear (when he wakes
up it turns out to be a vulture). This time we have O’Bannon
openly discussing being paid to bed women, and there’s a scene
with a bunch of hookers that turns into a seemingly innocent
pillow fight, only to end with Chon and O’Bannon naked. There’s
even an obligatory reprise of the dream sequence, but played here
more for titillation than comedy.

If it didn’t contain perhaps the best physical performance
from Jackie to hit American screens since the even more
problematic Mr. Nice Guy in 1998, there would be little
reason to see Shanghai Knights. Given a funnier, less
problematic script, or maybe one more good fight scene, I would
be able to recommend it outright. As it is, these factors more or
less cancel each other out, leaving Shanghai Knights
hovering on the edge of recommendability, like all the rest of
Jackie’s Hollywood buddy films. For those who appreciate him as
much as I do, that’s reason enough to see it.